Setting goals

So to motivate myself to train better and to make my training a bit more interesting I would like to set up a goal for a 5k time, but I have a hard time knowing what's realistic and what's just too easy and what sort of timescale I should use. I ran 5k in 26.40 without any preparation (running a few times a year), then started running and going to the gym once a week for two months and got down to 24.07. I think that running is good fun and my aim is now to run 2-3 times a week. Looking ahead what are good and challenging targets for 3 months, 6 months and a year ahead? (I'm 28 and female). Any advise appreciated!

You are young, healthy, and apparently have a good fitness base already and you're fast. But you'll need to work your mileage up gradually to get used to the strain additional training will put on your body. Don't think speed right now, think mileage.

I think a good goal for 3 months is to be running 4-5 times a week for about 25-30 miles/week

I think a good goal for 6 months is to be running 5 times a week and doing tempos or intervals one day a week and a long run once a week. A 5K time of 22:00 is probably attainable.A good goal for 1 year is a tempo run, an interval run and a long run with two recovery runs per week, with about 40 mpw and a 5K time of 20:00.

What other endurance related/aerobic activities do you do? Your general fitness from other activities will impact what would be reasonable goals. If you limit yourself to running 2-3 times a week you are also drastically limiting what you could accomplish, even if several of those runs are fairly hard efforts. As for possibilities, if you wanted to make a serious effort at training, you could possibly be winning small, local 5Ks in a year with times around 20 minutes.

Only running 3 days a week has put me into Injuryville and Stagnation throughout the past year... I haven't been able to add more than 2 miles a week - Training for 15 months and I'm still only able to do 13 (up from 10) miles per week total... it's kinda depressing.

Ways that I've learned, and will now be implementing in order to avoid this:

1. Don't run every workout fast - do the majority of them a bit on the slow side.

2. Make sure that your long run isn't any more than, say, 30% of your overall mileage.

Running 4 days a week makes #2 almost a given, it also sets you up to hit #1 more readily - 1 fast run, 1 recovery, 1 long (slow!) run, 1 recovery..

I think that a 22:30 in 3 months is attainable. In 6 months, a 21:15. A year from now, sub-20, for sure.

p.s. The general rule of thumb is that you can increase mileage by 10% per week... just make sure that there's an occasional rest-week in there and that you listen to your body - sometimes you'll just wanna plateau for a few weeks.

p.p.s. "slow" - i.e. the pace those recovery runs and long runs should be done at - would be approx. 5k race pace + 2-3 minutes. As such, yours should be right around 10 minute miles. Though you're capable of it, I can guarantee you that if you push it closer to 8:30-9:00ish, increasing distance will be well nigh impossible.

I also like the idea of "consistency" related goals (# of times/week, monthly mileage, etc). Race times are a result of training. Work on nailing the training and the race times will improve. Judging from your improvements so far and current times in the 5k, I would agree with wcrunner that you could be a consistent top 3 finisher in local 5ks...the key is putting in the training. (I would peg the EternalOptimist's improvement curve as optimistic...then again you never know)